Chapter 4 - Gathering the Scraps
For three days, I lay on that army cot in the damp cellar, letting my body heal while the city above searched frantically for my body.
According to the encrypted police scanner Maya tuned into every morning, the official story was already locked in: Damian Voss, notorious crime lord, had perished in a violent internal power struggle at the Cordova Hotel. Julian Reyes had already stepped forward as the new head of the city's unified council, pledging millions to urban renewal while quietly carving up my assets with Marcus Kane at his right hand.
They thought I was food for the worms. They thought the empire belonged to them.
They had no idea what was brewing beneath their feet.
"Your phone is completely burned," Maya said on the fourth morning, sliding a battered burner phone across the crate. "We pulled the SIM card before we dumped your coat in the bay. This one routes through twelve proxy servers in Eastern Europe. Nobody can trace it."
I took the phone, testing its weight. My hand was steady now. The antidote Nora had brewed had neutralized the neurotoxin, leaving only a dull ache in my chest as a permanent reminder of the betrayal.
"Can you access my offshore accounts?" I asked.
Nora shook her head, leaning over a keyboard. "Not directly. Julian and Marcus locked down your main corporate shells within two hours of the poisoning. But they missed the ghost accounts—the ones you set up under shell companies in the Caymans back in 2018."
"Good girl," I murmured. "Show me."
For the next six hours, Maya and Nora demonstrated a level of hacking and intelligence-gathering that left me stunned. These weren't just street kids; they were digital ghosts. They had spent three years building dossiers on every corrupt cop, crooked judge, and low-level enforcer in the city. They knew who took bribes, who beat their wives, and where Marcus Kane kept his secondary ledger.
"If we want to take them down," I said, leaning forward into the dim yellow light of the hanging bulb, "we can't just use brute force anymore. My enforcers are dead or have switched sides. We need to strike where they are weakest: their money and their trust."
"Trust is already cracking," Nora said with a sly smile. She tapped a few keys, bringing up a live security feed from the lobby of the Reyes Corporation tower. "Julian thinks he's the king now, but Marcus is already skimming off the top of the shipping contracts. They're arguing over the spoils. Thieves always turn on each other when the master's hand is gone."
"Then it's time to throw a match into the powder keg," I said, standing up from the cot. My knees popped, and a wave of dizziness washed over me, but I forced myself to stand tall. I was Damian Voss. I didn't crawl.
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"What's our first move?" Maya asked, looking up with a mixture of awe and fierce anticipation.
"We start by waking up a few old friends," I said, pulling the burner phone toward me. "Men who think I'm dead, and who hate Julian Reyes even more than they hated me."
